Data Erasure Knowledge Base

Make sure all the NAND chips are broken for destruction or use an erasure software that has been validated by Ontrack.

Data erasure is the removal of data from a storage device such that it cannot be recovered. Data erasure software writes a repeating pattern of 1’s and 0’s over all of the data locations on a hard drive or SSD so that the original data is no longer accessible. The software also removes all data from temporary locations.

Best practices involve using data erasure software to securely overwrite data on hard drives and SSDs, including the hidden areas and remapped sectors. Erasure is done per government standards such as NIST, DOD, and many more.

Erasure software is used before the drives are transported to equipment for physical destruction to eliminate the possibility of data being intercepted during transport. Physical destruction on hard disk drives can be done with a degausser that uses a powerful magnetic field, which erases not only the data but removes the servo tracks, making the media unusable. The most permanent and final destruction solution involves the use of granulators, also known as shredders. These machines rip, tear, or smash a hard drive or SSD into pieces so small that data cannot be recovered from the media or memory chips.

Data erasure is the removal of data from a storage device such that it cannot be recovered. Data erasure software repeatedly writes a pattern of 1’s and 0’s over all of the data locations on a hard drive or SSD so that the original data is no longer accessible. The software also removes all data from temporary locations. File erasure software allows the user to target all instances of specific files to be erased, instead of wiping all data from the entire storage media.

Data erasure can occur in minutes when an encryption key is digitally shredded. Otherwise, erasure can take minutes to hours, depending on the capacity and performance level of the storage media.

Data erasure should be used when the data on a storage device is no longer needed for business purposes, retention policy or other compliance, and legal matters, and would create risk for the organization if it were to be accessed by unintended users.

Erasure coding (EC) is a method of data protection in which data is broken into fragments, or sectors, expanded and encoded with redundant data pieces and stored across a set of different locations or storage media. The goal of erasure coding is to enable data that becomes corrupted at some point in the disk storage process to be reconstructed by using information about the data that’s stored elsewhere in the array. Erasure codes are often used instead of traditional RAID because of their ability to reduce the time and overhead required to reconstruct data. Erasure coding can be more CPU-intensive than traditional RAID systems, resulting in increased latency.